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Monday, 30 March 2015

Week 19

This past week went by at a good tick, with progress in all areas. I am finding that journaling this on a weekly basis is helping immensely with motivation. I can see the improvement week by week and it really is helping me focus my efforts for greater gain. Sometimes it feels slow and pokey, but I have to remind myself that Garrison chores, while time consuming are integral to the whole.

One thing that really does alleviate the stress of the Garrison is having a Storehouse. A lot of people dismiss this building out of hand. On the face of it, it presents mere convenience, sporting your personal banker at level 1 and adding a guild banker at level 2 and a transmog NPC at level 3. The real beauty of this building lies in the benefits to all your buildings. It adds to the available work order queue, +5 at level 1, +10 at level 2 and +15 at level 3. So, with a level 3 barn I have a work order queue of 36. This means I can go 6 days without trapping. The benefits of this are that instead of having to slog all the way out to Nagrand every day, I can go roughly once a week, scheduling it at my convenience. I use flasks to speed up kills, and just stock right up. This is an immense time saver, even if you only look at travel time involved.

The increased queues also mean that on days when I am pressed for time, or feel like doing something else, I only have to do the Herb Garden, Mine, Missions and daily cooldown; the work orders can wait for another day.

The last benefit is in the relationship with the Trading Post. As you know, the Trading Post has a different trade available every day, and a different trader every day (for the most part). The best price you can get on a trade with a trader is 4GR for one material, so you can get 5 mats for 20GR, but you earn 30GR for the mats you trade in for work orders. You use this building to print mats, and use those mats to print gold.

Let's say you traded in 5 Draenic Dust for a work order. You would receive 30GR when the work order was complete. That day you have Pyxni as the Trader. She will sell you 5 Draenic Dust for 20GR (4GR per dust) You do the trade and instead of the 5 Draenic Dust you started off with, you now also have a 10GR profit to go with it. You use those accumulated GR profits to buy even more mats.

The most profitable way to use this building is to trade in low value mats, typically herbs on most servers, and use the GR gained to buy the more expensive mats, typically Draenic Dust, from the Trader who offers the best price, always at 4GR per mat.

How does this tie to the Storehouse? The expanded queue means that you can bypass trades on the days when the trade offered is not for the lowest priced mats, and jam the queue full on days when it is. In this way, you always have work orders processing, and you always get the best possible result. With an empty queue, I could trade in 180 Starflower with a market value of 216g, receive 1080GR in return, and use those to purchase 270 Draenic Dust with a market value of 1620g, a profit of 1404g. Do that across all your alts, and you're laughing your way to the bank. If you did this trade every week, on 10 characters, for the remainder of the expansion starting today, (85 weeks give or take), you would realize a profit of 1,193,400g for mere minutes of work each day.

This is why, in my opinion, the Storehouse is the most powerful building you can have on your garrison, and every single character I have either has one, or will have one.

With the completion of And They All Would Go Down Together, I have now completed Glory of the Raider 25 and have officially finished Naxx. I will still run it every week, though, as with the massive numbers of trash it is a cash cow. I think I still need a couple of pets from there too.

Work on ICC continues with a few lingering achievements to clean up, and I've decided to work on Shadowmourne on Deathvixen. Firelands will be a staple in my weekly legacy runs. Eccentrica has finished part one of the quest chain for Tarecgosa's Wrath and now faces weeks of runs to round up the remainder of the pieces needed.

Mounts, Pets, Toys & Heirlooms - nothing new this week

Gold - 473,571g - an increase of 81,181g. I am very pleased with progress here this week, considering that I spent 9,000g on building upgrades and I didn't feel that I had that much posted. Beast Hide is stockpiling in my guild bank because the price has been abysmal this week, while Draenic Dust (which I am clean out of) has skyrocketed.

Because prices are all over the map, I've decided to delay selling mats until I am reasonably happy with the price and the available supply. I have no intentions of tinkering with supply. I've tried that before and can attest to the fact that trying to control a market is a path to ruin. You can do it only in very specific circumstances, and those simply are not present in the markets with which I am currently dealing.

I managed to get in some questing time on Ironicah and she is now level 98 and is 1/4 of the way through Gorgrond. I was getting rather anxious about her Garrison Resource cap as she was getting quite close, and her upgrade to Garrison level 3 is still some ways off. To alleviate this, I spent 1000GR on a Follower Trait Retraining Guide. She only has one follower with a Treasure Hunter trait, and that one is assigned to a building, so it will pay off in the end.

I am very happy with gold gains this week in the face of expenditures on Garrison upgrades, and I am reasonably happy with the 22 new achievements.

Eccentrica got in another LFR run and finally looted an upgrade. More LFR this week, with Vix and Larrisah joining the fray. Perhaps I will even get Morrisminor in there before the week is up.

All Dwarven Bunkers were upgraded to level 3 for the weekly reroll seal, to help get rid of scraps and for the extra daily quest and follower gear upgrades. Ironicah's buildings were upgraded to level 2 so that followers could be assigned and to increase production.

I had a glance over the BiS lists on Icy Veins and was surprised to find that the crafted weapons are the best I will able to find outside of normal raiding. The plan now is to craft and fully upgrade weapons for each character. This is going to take an awful lot of True Iron Ingots as I have 4 melee at the moment. Eccentrica has her level 2 staff, and Madmurray has his level 2 gun, so this week I will craft and upgrade a weapon for Vix. To help in this I have stopped selling Savage Blood. I wasn't happy with the current price anyway.

This week I plan to further examine BiS so I can better plan my gearing and crafting. I may also start to gem and enchant this week.

Other than that, my main goal for the week is to finish levelling Ironicah, and if time permits to make more headway in levelling the 3 danglers on my other account.

5 comments:

Here's the thing with the Storehouse. You don't have room for it if you have 2 prof buildings, because A Salvage Yard is almost essential. I really wish we could have 4 Small buildings. It's the same with the Trading Post. I consider the Inn essential for new followers, so I can't have the Trading Post on those with a barn.

Given all that, I'm going to re-think having an Enchanting Shack on my Scribe. It was there to get more Temporal Crystals, but I think your idea of getting a Storehouse there would be better.

Lanky, thank you as always for your comments. I enjoy having you to present different points of view and to bounce ideas around with. You're a real treasure, you are.

Your point about the Salvage Yard is well taken, and has been important to gearing, seeing as I have yet to finish out Nagrand on any character. Indeed, I have agonized over the choice of Salvage Yard or Storehouse on dual-crafting toons. On my dual gatheres it was a no-brainer; they enjoy the best of both worlds with garrisons sporting both buildings.

Each building has value, and it does make the choices beyond a building to match your primary professions very difficult. Inn or Barracks? Bunker or Stables? Ideally I'd love to have a Garrison sporting an Inn, Barracks, Bunker, Stables, Mage Tower, Trading Post, Lumber Yard, Storehosue and Salvage Yard.

I think it would be valuable to track the gold gained for a week on average across toons with a Salvage Yard, and compare it to the possible output of the Storehouse. Beyond gold, once you are resonably well geard, the only value of the Salvage Yard is follower gear and gear upgrades, and that can be obtained in other ways than through Salvage. I have a feeling that the Storehouse will continue to come out ahead, but I could be in for a surprise.

However you slice it though, gold can't compensate for the benefits of the larger work order queues and the freedom from the grind that comes with it. We shall see though.

Also, yeah, perhaps I will through up a cast and crew page to have a handy reference guide for who I am currently playing.